Health Benefits Of Standardized Testing

Standardized testing skyrocketed after 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. By definition, a standardized test is any form of testing that requires test takers to answer the same questions to compare the relative performance of individual students or groups of students. The question whether or not standardized testing is beneficial to children's education has been around for quite some time. Studies show that on average, in America's public schools, students take around 112 tests from kindergarten to twelfth grade (“Are Exams Bad.” 1). Many teachers, parents, and students are becoming reluctant and question whether or not these tests are beneficial to one's learning, or harmful.
For many years, people have thought of standardized tests to be beneficial …show more content…
(Standardized Tests, 3). Students are losing out majorly in the long run. Many standardized tests include a written portion where students do not fill out a tiny bubble but instead are made to write a short response. However, these responses are not graded fairly either. Many written parts are graded by people with only a bachelor's degree which do not need to be related to education at all. Many factors can affect how a student does on a written part, it could be that the grader had a bad day, or that one grader has higher expectations than another. (Standardized Tests, 20). Standardized testing is a huge money pit and political machine. Since the NCLB act passed in 2002, annual state spending on standardized testing rose from $423 million to $1.1 Billion (Standardized Tests, 1). The act being passed and the huge increase in spending were meant to raise America's test scores but in global regards, they've only fallen. In global testing, Shanghai and other parts of Asia left the U.S. in the dust (Standardized Tests, 15). For all this spending, teachers can not even see the tests until months after the students take them and no information is given on how to improve …show more content…
This means late nights cramming material from the beginning of the year, teachers making sure they prepare you with everything you need to know, and parents waiting anxiously for the results. If these tests were taken seriously by the test makers themselves they would be very beneficial but the time spent grading them, who grades them, and the amount of questions that end up as “invalid” is a joke. Testing should not be taken away completely but reduced or started at a later grade. Companies that write the tests and test booklets should not have to include instructions on what to do if a child throws up on their test nor should a parent have to be informed that something like that happened. This is not the way we should be preparing today's